Bibi sees the Arab Spring as a bad omen for regional peace, but is it our only opportunity?

With Palestinian pennants fluttering in the breeze and a large poster of the
late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat behind him, the mufti of Jerusalem, one of
the supreme Palestinian religious authorities, seemed to call on the Muslim
faithful to kill Jews. “The hour of resurrection will not come until you fight
the Jews,” Sheikh Muhammad Hussein declared, quoting a saying attributed to the
prophet Muhammad.

“The Jews will hide behind stones and trees. But the
trees and the stones will call: Oh Muslim, oh servant of God, this is a Jew
hiding behind me, so come and kill him.” The emcee who introduced the sheikh at
the early January ceremony in East Jerusalem marking the 47th anniversary of the
secular Fatah movement was equally uncompromising: “Our war with the descendants
of apes and pigs is a religious war of faith,” he rasped.

In the
immediate aftermath, the mufti summarily rejected accusations of
incitement. The context of his remarks, he argued, was the end of days,
and since that was in the far distant future, he had not been calling for any
killing now.

For many Israelis, however, the more relevant context was the Arab spring. The popular uprisings across the Arab
world have seen the empowerment of Islamist movements in Tunisia, Libya and
Egypt and given wide currency to radical attitudes to Israel and Jews that many
believe could ultimately make accommodation between Israel and the Arab world,
or Israel and the Palestinians, impossible.

Indeed, if taken at face
value, Islamist political and religious ideology ostensibly rules out any modus
vivendi with Israel. It calls for a monolithic Muslim Caliphate governed
by religious shari’a law, extending well beyond the Middle East and leaving no
room for a Jewish state in its midst.

The specter of this kind of
Islamist expansion has been traumatic for the Israeli government. As he made
clear in a major Knesset address in November, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
believes the Arab spring has taken the Arabs “not forward, but backward,” and he
sees Israel surrounded by a potentially hostile sea of “illiberal, anti-
Western, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic” fundamentalism stretching from Egypt
to Iran. His response has been a fundamental change in Israeli policy:
suspending efforts to deepen engagement with the Arab world wherever possible
and instead reinstituting a closed “Fortress Israel” model, shoring up defenses,
preparing for the worst and hoping to ride out the gathering
storm.

Potential opportunities

Some leading Israeli Middle East experts,
however, insist that the Arab spring is far more diverse and complex than
Netanyahu’s fundamentalist nightmare. Indeed, they accuse the government of
scaremongering to win votes, and touting its bleak vision as an excuse to
justify the do-nothing Palestinian policy it would have adopted anyway. They
argue that it should, in fact, be taking a far more proactive line to defuse
threats, to exploit new opportunities or, at the very least, to create
conditions for progress, if and when conditions permit.

For several years
now, Moshe Maoz has been monitoring attitudes throughout the Muslim world
towards Jews and Israel. In a recently published book entitled “Muslim Attitudes
towards Jews and Israel: The Ambivalences of Rejection, Antagonism, Tolerance
and Cooperation,” the Hebrew University professor emeritus argues that there is
a strong pragmatic strain of Islam just waiting for a chance to establish ties
with Israel.

“One of our main findings was this: If we were to solve the
Palestinian problem, the Muslims won’t suddenly love us, but the radicals would
no longer have an excuse for hostility towards Israel, and more importantly, the
many Muslim actors out there looking to normalize relations would have the
justification they need,” he tells The Report. According to Maoz, once the
Palestinian problem is solved Muslim countries like Indonesia, Pakistan and
Turkey would strengthen ties with Israel, and a succession of Arab states would
quickly follow. In other words, instead of deferring action on the Palestinian
problem, the government should be doing all it can to solve it.

An expert
on Syria, Maoz maintains that if President Bashar Assad falls, a Sunni
government in Damascus could break with Shiite Iran and become part of a
powerful Sunni alliance including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
States, guided and supported by the US. And that could open the way for Israel
to build on the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which offered it normalization
with the region as a whole in return for a peace deal with the
Palestinians.

“Maybe it sounds naïve, but potentially we could still form
an alliance of common interest with a relatively moderate Sunni Islam terrified
by Iran,” Maoz contends.

The key, of course, is Egypt, the largest and
most powerful Arab country, where the Muslim Brotherhood, the predominant Sunni
Islamist organization, now holds sway. With a sweeping 45 percent of the vote in
the recent parliamentary election, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party
will form the next government and have a significant input into Egyptian policy
vis-à-vis Israel.

So far the signs are good. In an early December meeting
in Cairo with American officials including John Kerry, Chairman of Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, leaders of the Islamist party announced
categorically that they have no intention of reneging on the 33-year-old peace
deal with Israel. The State Department has since received similar assurances.
The Islamists have also urged the Americans to increase aid and investment in
Egypt. With a newfound pragmatism now that they are the ones who have to feed 85
million Egyptians, the Muslim Brothers are ostensibly ready to work with the US
and maintain a low-key modus vivendi with Israel.

Pragmatic Brothers

The
ideology of Islamist movements in opposition is very different from that when
they become the dominant force, says Yoram Meital, Chairman of the Chaim Herzog
Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy at Ben-Gurion University. “The
change in the Arab world cannot be understood simply through a catalogue of
ideological documents; it must also be seen in the context of current political
and economic exigencies,” he tells The Report.

Meital argues that not
only are the Brothers proving more pragmatic than expected, they will not be the
only ones making policy in Egypt. When the new leadership in Cairo crystallizes,
there will be at least three other significant sources of power: the president,
the army and the young people who started the rebellion in the first place – all
of whom are likely press the Islamists closer to the West.

The US, says
Meital, could help this process by providing much needed aid and by supporting
revolutionary forces elsewhere, like in Syria. And he dismisses the widespread
claim that the Arab Spring has degenerated into an Islamic winter as “a
simplistic trope that ignores the complexity of the revolution now underway in
Egypt.”

Most importantly, Meital thinks the new Egypt could actually help
Israelis and Palestinians cut a deal. The close relationship between the Muslim
Brothers and Hamas, which sees itself as the Brothers’ Palestinian arm, is key.
Clearly it will limit Israel’s freedom of operation against Hamas in Gaza,
because, with the Brothers in power, major military action could trigger
escalation with Egypt.

But potentially even more dramatic is the other
side of the coin: That the Brothers, reluctant to be sucked into confrontation
by Hamas, are already reportedly pressing their Palestinian ally to exercise
restraint and even allow accommodation with Israel. “If an Israeli
government were to put for ward a concrete peace proposal, I think it would find support in places it
doesn’t expect, like the new Egyptian government. I mean indirect,
behind-the-scenes support, like urging Hamas not to torpedo an agreement based
on two states along the 1967 borders,” Meital argues.

Already Hamas
leader Khaled Mashaal is showing signs of new thinking influenced by the changes
in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. In a late December interview with the
Associated Press’s Mohammed Daraghmeh in Cairo, he implied a readiness to
replace terror with mass protests and to accept a Palestinian state in the 1967
borders. Popular protests, he said, “have the power of a tsunami.” And on the
reconciliation with Fatah for which he has been working for months he declared:
“We have political differences, but the common ground is the state on the 1967
borders. Why don’t we work in this common area?” he asked. “The nation is bigger
than the party.”

Moreover, in closed party deliberations, Mashaal has
reportedly been praising the pragmatism of the Brotherhood and urging Hamas to
become more like its parent body, a strictly political and social movement, and
to abandon violence.

Exploit the momentum

Tel Aviv University’s Shaul
Mishal, author with Avraham Sela of “Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and
Coexistence,” sees Mashaal’s attempt to draw closer to Fatah as another example
of a new two-pronged leadership model based on an unprecedented secular-Islamist
partnership that has been spreading across the Middle East with the Arab
spring.

“What before the Arab spring would have been inconceivable is now
the reality: That the Egyptian army, which for decades bore down heavily on the
Islamists, is now their ally. And the same kind of thing is happening in Jordan
and with the Palestinians,” he tells The Report.

In Mishal’s view, this
new regional partnership model, coupled with the fact that Hamas is reducing its
emphasis on armed struggle and terror to a declarative minimum, opens up new
possibilities for Israeli-Palestinian accommodation. But, he says, progress will
not come if the Israelis and Palestinians are left to their own devices. The
level of mutual mistrust is too high.

Instead of more barren
Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, he suggests exploiting the momentum of the Arab
spring to set up a new regional negotiating structure. “The only realistic
chance of reopening a relevant and positive dialogue with the Palestinians is by
adopting a kind of mini-Arab initiative, with Egypt, Jordan and maybe the Gulf
States,” he says.

Not all Israeli analysts are as optimistic. On
the contrary, many tend to see the rise of the Islamists much the way the
government does: as making resolution of the Palestinian issue even more
difficult.

Nevertheless, here too there are those who insist that
Netanyahu should be far more proactive in his approach to the historic
events. Their argument is that Israel should not allow the Arab spring to
expose it to a wave of delegitimizing mass protests against the occupation or to
prevent it from achieving its strategic goal of two states for two
peoples. In other words, Israel should deflect Arab and other criticism
of the occupation and further its strategic goals by initiating moves to
facilitate the creation of a two-state reality on the ground. That means further
withdrawal from territory in the West Bank and more sovereignty for the
Palestinian Authority.

Some, like would-be opposition Kadima leader Shaul
Mofaz, believe this should be done through an interim agreement with the
Palestinians on a partial pullback from around 60 percent of the West Bank;
others go further, arguing that it would have to be done unilaterally, because
in present Arab Spring circumstances any formal agreement with the Palestinians
is pie in the sky.

The Arab Spring, this small but growing band of
unilateralists insists, has propelled Israel back into the pre-1967 era, when
all it had was armistices with various Arab players, none of whom was ready to
recognize it. The best it can hope for now, they say, are similar informal
cease-fire arrangements that promote stability and create conditions for more
formal future deals, if and when conditions allow.

On one thing the
optimists and pessimists agree: In the face of the rise of radical Islam, the
challenge Israel faces is to find ways to tap into signs of pragmatism to help
defuse a national dispute over borders and rights – and to preempt a slide into
the kind of apocalyptic religious war to the death the mufti of Jerusalem and
those with him that cold January day seemed to be espousing.

Sites Of Interest

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